Comments for My Suburban Destiny

Comment on Ute-lite, an idea for a constructed language by Dirk

Dirk — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:43:52 +0000

There’s a new edition of Givón’s grammar available now—published by John Benjamins. The Texts should be out this summer (and the Dictionary two years from now, I suppose). The new grammar is a vast improvement over the old one, but it’s still not very user-friendly and all but ignores the fascinating phonology of the language, as did the previous version. At least he made better orthographic choices (but still not great ones).

While I sympathize with the desire for “Ute-lite”, as a field linguist I think it would be a shame if the only thing that survived of the language was such a stripped-down version. Better than nothing, I suppose, but still …

I do heartily endorse the effort as an intellectual challenge, however. I’ve played around with something like “Numic-lite” for a couple of years now, and it’s helped me to understand the Numic languages better. Professionally I focus on phonology (first Shoshone/Goshute—my dissertation was on the consonant phonology of Goshute); “Numic-lite” has forced me to come to grips with grammar as well.

Comment on Reading Toki Pona is Hard by jan Kitope (chuff)

jan Kitope (chuff) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:57:54 +0000

Are you interested in developing/brainstorming workarounds for (some of) these?

Comment on My toki pona to do list by Chris Huff

Chris Huff — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:43:47 +0000

How can I get in on some of this? :)
(Especially the phrase dictionary and/or tweet stream)

Comment on Locally Dead Languages, like French, and What they’ve in common with Conlangs. by Neicen

Neicen — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 22:38:36 +0000

Linguistic pedagogy is horrible. There are all sorts of half-known swami moves that will get you to the right place (e.g. Heisig for learning the Kanji, Madrigal’s for Spanish) but when your dominant culture is trying to make you and the rest of the world monoglots it’s not easy. The only way I found of listening to French tho was thru Librivox.

Memrise would be good if it weren’t so slow.

Comment on Measuring myself by Sonja

Sonja — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:57:18 +0000

sina wile ala wile toki lon ilo Skype?

Comment on Measuring myself by Sonja

Sonja — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:56:10 +0000

sina pona :)

Comment on Fell in love with a girl by pia

pia — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:14:42 +0000

Rhymes with pompeii, black hair, vegan fondue?

Comment on Conlangs and Online Communities by Cody Smith

Cody Smith — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 01:05:32 +0000

There’s actually a really great Conlanger’s group on Facebook that doesn’t have any trolls at all. The biggest argument that happened there, as I recall, was a small back-and-forth between 2 of the members about auxlangs or something.
http://www.facebook.com/groups/conlangs/

Comment on Things I wish I’d starting doing soon in 2nd Language Learning by Leonardo Boiko

Leonardo Boiko — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:03:19 +0000

Agree with most, but those days I’ve became skeptical of things like 2 and 5. My current list is:

– Spend less time with flashcards
– Not worry about drilling
– Not worry about “getting the basics well”
– Spend more time actually doing the stuff you wanted to do with the language in the first place (reading literature, etc), even if (especially if!) your knowledge is incomplete

Comment on Toki pona: Insults by matt

matt — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:49:26 +0000

Fix that and a few others mistakes. I wrote that post long ago, I guess I’ve gotten better.